文：司馬勤（Ken Smith） 編譯：李正欣

從語(yǔ)法的角度來(lái)看，拉丁語(yǔ)中的“歌劇”（opera）只不過(guò)是“作品”（opus）的復(fù)數(shù)形式（拉丁語(yǔ)中的opus是指單一“作品”的意思）。因此，倘若我們寬容些，大可以將阿什利·福雷（Ashley Fure）所創(chuàng)作的《萬(wàn)物之力：實(shí)物歌劇》（The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects）視為一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的語(yǔ)法計(jì)數(shù)錯(cuò)誤。

但是，福雷畢業(yè)于哈佛大學(xué)，跟她共事的都是聰明人，所以這一小“錯(cuò)誤”背后多半藏有乾坤。這部歷時(shí)50分鐘的作品里包含了很多東西：沉浸式體驗(yàn)、豐富的聲效，以及時(shí)而產(chǎn)生的視覺(jué)刺激——有一部分要?dú)w功于她同樣聰明的哥哥，建筑師亞當(dāng)·福雷（Adam Fure），是他設(shè)計(jì)了整個(gè)演出的實(shí)質(zhì)環(huán)境。作品甚至還包含了一個(gè)政治導(dǎo)向正確的概念，試圖讓觀眾注意到“在我們周圍有不斷增長(zhǎng)的、因?yàn)樯鷳B(tài)問(wèn)題而引發(fā)的焦慮的嗡嗡聲”（這是作曲家在節(jié)目介紹中提到的）。但還是應(yīng)該實(shí)話實(shí)說(shuō)：這不是一部歌?。?/p>

大概從普契尼逝世的那天起，我們就一直在思考：是什么構(gòu)成了“歌劇”。毫無(wú)疑問(wèn)，我們比那群活在16世紀(jì)文藝復(fù)興后期的佛羅倫薩文人更加深究這個(gè)問(wèn)題。當(dāng)年，他們認(rèn)為自己只是在重建古希臘戲劇。

然而，如今，沒(méi)有人會(huì)考慮要“重建”任何東西，就算——或者尤其是——當(dāng)他們的確在“重建”的過(guò)程中時(shí)。一切必須“新穎”，即便完全缺乏新意。大概半個(gè)世紀(jì)前，披頭士樂(lè)隊(duì)（Beatles）把不同歌曲的主題連接起來(lái)而“開辟了新天地”。當(dāng)時(shí)卻沒(méi)有人提出這個(gè)棘手的史實(shí)：比他們?cè)?50多年前，舒伯特與舒曼已把這個(gè)創(chuàng)意付諸實(shí)踐：一個(gè)時(shí)代的聲樂(lè)套曲（song cycle）可以變成下一個(gè)時(shí)代的概念專輯（concept album）。

如果“概念專輯”有相互關(guān)聯(lián)的角色并最終串聯(lián)成一個(gè)故事時(shí)，又應(yīng)該如何歸類？涉及到 “誰(shuí)人樂(lè)隊(duì)”（The Who）的主音吉他手、曾經(jīng)譜寫了《湯米》（Tommy）與《四重人格》（Quadrophenia）的皮特·湯森（Pete Townshend），宣傳方會(huì)稱之為“搖滾歌劇”（rock opera）。那么描述美國(guó)西部荒野的史詩(shī)影片呢？“牛仔歌劇”（horse opera）。還有那些情節(jié)稀里糊涂、如同刻意插播推銷給家庭主婦的洗滌劑廣告的日間電視劇的作品呢？“肥皂歌劇”（soap opera）。

從這里你發(fā)現(xiàn)了什么？盡管歌劇愛(ài)好者與從業(yè)者熱衷于爭(zhēng)論歌劇的定義，局外人借用這個(gè)名詞，僅僅是因?yàn)橛蒙稀案鑴　眱勺?，立刻身價(jià)十倍，無(wú)論內(nèi)容與音樂(lè)戲劇舞臺(tái)能否扯得上任何關(guān)系。

現(xiàn)在我們已經(jīng)進(jìn)入了21世紀(jì)第二個(gè)十年的尾聲，大家都認(rèn)同歌劇再不需要用上傳統(tǒng)的吟唱形式（嘻哈音樂(lè)與朋克搖滾套在歌劇里的個(gè)案，效果令人信服）、不必避開口語(yǔ)對(duì)白、再?zèng)]有固定長(zhǎng)度、舞臺(tái)規(guī)模大小均可。但是，唯一不可或缺的是故事性。讓我大膽地做出這個(gè)假設(shè)：只要作品有某種戲劇敘事性和某種帶有韻律的發(fā)聲技巧，大家都可以以此為據(jù)，把作品納入“歌劇”之列。

在林肯中心2018年莫扎特音樂(lè)節(jié)上演出的《萬(wàn)物之力》

然而《萬(wàn)物之力》上述的兩者皆缺。啊，差點(diǎn)忘了，演員名單上包括兩名聲樂(lè)家（vocalists），盡管他們制造出來(lái)的聽覺(jué)效果，與管樂(lè)、打擊樂(lè)演奏的同樣抽象、同樣脫離人性化，他們發(fā)出來(lái)的聲音沒(méi)有任何創(chuàng)意可言。觀眾聆聽得到的聲音——作曲家預(yù)先聲明，很多的聲音因?yàn)轭l率過(guò)低，人類的耳朵無(wú)法察覺(jué)——都是過(guò)去這50年來(lái)前衛(wèi)音樂(lè)家早已發(fā)明的現(xiàn)代主義演奏技巧。具有諷刺意味的是，這部作品于2016年在德國(guó)達(dá)姆施塔特（Darmstadt）新音樂(lè)夏季課程首演——1950年代，達(dá)姆施塔特正是培育音樂(lè)創(chuàng)新的前衛(wèi)藝術(shù)重鎮(zhèn)。

今年夏季，《萬(wàn)物之力》在林肯中心莫扎特音樂(lè)節(jié)（Mostly Mozart Festival）亮相，演出場(chǎng)地是布魯克林的柯克蘭藝術(shù)中心（Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center）。作曲家形容這部作品是對(duì)氣候變化所引發(fā)的焦慮情緒的音樂(lè)隱喻，她更要觀眾感受一下自然世界的慢節(jié)奏。對(duì)我來(lái)說(shuō)，作品只有一系列任意的音響，它們沒(méi)有連貫性，抓不住我的注意力。

如果硬要把《萬(wàn)物之力》歸納為歌劇，就像硬要將瑜伽吟誦與《羅摩衍那》（Ramayana，印度史詩(shī)）相提并論。但后來(lái)我覺(jué)得還有個(gè)更確切的描述會(huì)引起共鳴——比如說(shuō)，“哲學(xué)性的聲音裝置”（philosophical sound installation）——但聽起來(lái)又毫無(wú)吸引力。

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福雷撰寫《萬(wàn)物之力》的節(jié)目介紹雖然妄自尊大，但我今年夏天曾看過(guò)一部更夸張的作品，名為《我們的死亡不會(huì)傷害他人，第一部分》（Our Death Won’t Hurt Anybody – Part 1）：毫無(wú)情節(jié)，全無(wú)結(jié)構(gòu)，歷時(shí)四個(gè)半小時(shí)，聲稱受《孫子兵法》所啟迪。這是巴塞羅那希臘藝術(shù)節(jié)與香港西九龍文化局的聯(lián)合委約。

大家想想有多么諷刺：閱讀整部《孫子兵法》都用不了四個(gè)半小時(shí)；而畫蛇添足標(biāo)注的“第一部分”，令我聯(lián)想到當(dāng)代文豪諾曼·梅勒（Norman Mailer）。他那本長(zhǎng)達(dá)1300頁(yè)的小說(shuō)在最后一頁(yè)竟然標(biāo)上了“未完待續(xù)”。梅勒的讀者還算幸運(yùn)，作家沒(méi)有機(jī)會(huì)構(gòu)思續(xù)集就與世長(zhǎng)辭了。

《我們的死亡不會(huì)傷害他人》是香港鄧樹榮戲劇工作室與巴塞羅那恩里克·瓦格斯（Enrique Vargas）所領(lǐng)導(dǎo)的感官劇場(chǎng)（Teatro de los Sentidos）的合作項(xiàng)目。演出時(shí)所用的語(yǔ)言包括英語(yǔ)、西班牙語(yǔ)、加泰羅尼亞語(yǔ)、廣東話——我還依稀聽得出幾句零星的普通話與法語(yǔ)。幾乎每一位觀眾在演出的某個(gè)段落必定會(huì)因語(yǔ)言不通而有被排除在外的感受。下個(gè)演出季，該劇要在香港首演，到時(shí)候效果也應(yīng)該大同小異——只不過(guò)觀眾對(duì)于不同的部分將會(huì)給出不同反應(yīng)。

現(xiàn)在很難說(shuō)，巴塞羅那的演出版本到了香港會(huì)有多少變動(dòng)。到了香港，演員會(huì)再次逐一引領(lǐng)觀眾入場(chǎng)嗎？還會(huì)有一名華裔演員展示廚藝，弄一碟豉椒炒蜆，然后請(qǐng)大家試吃嗎？觀眾們還會(huì)再次被邀請(qǐng)登上舞臺(tái)跳舞，而只是面對(duì)一場(chǎng)戲中的假空襲嗎？

盡管這場(chǎng)演出包括一些相當(dāng)有效果的場(chǎng)景，整個(gè)晚上（四個(gè)半小時(shí)）卻好像工作坊一樣，演員之間似乎還沒(méi)有達(dá)到默契。最終，這個(gè)演出的最關(guān)鍵問(wèn)題是：因?yàn)檎w都缺乏推動(dòng)力，到了最后也無(wú)法營(yíng)造強(qiáng)烈的震撼感。

不過(guò)最起碼，《我們的死亡》沒(méi)有這么大的膽子，敢自稱為歌劇。

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診斷演出為什么失敗，要比解釋為什么演出成功更容易。我禁不住想，《我鄰居的天空》（My Neighbor Sky）——一部受胡安·米羅（Joan Miró）雕塑《月亮、太陽(yáng)和一顆星》（Moon, Sun and One Star）啟發(fā)的作品——的成功，是歸功于它只有50分鐘的時(shí)長(zhǎng)。但這么說(shuō)對(duì)于《我們的死亡》甚不公平。演出成功也不完全歸功于舞蹈家小栗（Naoyuki Oguri）和安德斯·科切羅（Andrés Corchero）在胡安·米羅基金會(huì)那座雕塑前的演出［還有吉他手努諾·魯貝洛（Nuno Rubelo）現(xiàn)場(chǎng)伴奏］。

應(yīng)該這樣說(shuō)，那個(gè)晚上的亮點(diǎn)來(lái)自兩位藝術(shù)家——一位日本人和一位加泰羅尼亞人——不僅分享了日本舞踏（Butoh）和現(xiàn)代舞的肢體風(fēng)格，他們倆對(duì)彼此的肢體優(yōu)勢(shì)、局限和特性都有充分的了解，并能夠互相回應(yīng)。然而，只憑藝術(shù)上的親密互通，還是難以獨(dú)立支撐其作品最終的成功。

整晚的節(jié)奏緩慢得幾乎讓觀眾感到痛苦。試想一下，仿佛是伊索寓言《龜兔賽跑》中的主角變成了烏龜和蛞蝓，其挪動(dòng)的速度不分伯仲，再用羅伯特·威爾遜（Robert Wilson）的典型舞臺(tái)風(fēng)格把故事呈現(xiàn)出來(lái)?？墒?，在這一個(gè)小時(shí)不到的時(shí)間里，小栗和科切羅徹底地宣泄了他們?nèi)康母星?，演出接近尾聲時(shí)觀眾能感覺(jué)兩人有明顯的改變，但卻說(shuō)不出他們經(jīng)歷了什么。

左、上：在林肯中心2018年莫扎特音樂(lè)節(jié)上演出的《萬(wàn)物之力》

在圣約翰大教堂舉行的大規(guī)模合唱《以地球之名》現(xiàn)場(chǎng)

欣賞過(guò)這樣有強(qiáng)烈表達(dá)力卻在沒(méi)有用上語(yǔ)言的舞臺(tái)呈現(xiàn)敘事方式，讓人們更加難以忍受那些使用所有可用的講故事工具，但仍然無(wú)法正確地表達(dá)出意圖的人。另一個(gè)例子是約翰·路德·亞當(dāng)斯（John Luther Adams）的《以地球之名》（In the Name of the Earth），由林肯中心主辦，8月在紐約舉行了世界首演。

與《我鄰居的天空》中親密無(wú)間的人際設(shè)定剛好相反，《以地球之名》動(dòng)用了大約600多名合唱演員與十幾位指揮家。演出原定于中央公園露天首演，結(jié)果由于風(fēng)雨交加，不得不移入紐約的圣約翰大教堂中。

亞當(dāng)斯——通常被稱為“另一位亞當(dāng)斯”（有時(shí)只稱呼為“路德”），以避免與寫出《尼克松在中國(guó)》（Nixon in China）及其他歌劇作品的作曲家約翰·亞當(dāng)斯（John Adams）混淆——因其管弦樂(lè)作品《成為海洋》（Become Ocean）而獲得2014年普利策音樂(lè)大獎(jiǎng)?！冻蔀楹Ｑ蟆芬园⒗辜雍兔绹?guó)西北部一帶的海洋為靈感；這次的《以地球之名》中也有來(lái)自水的靈感，合唱歌手用混合了多種語(yǔ)言的歌詞，吟唱著河流、湖泊、山脈和沙漠的名字。

盡管圣約翰大教堂是以其強(qiáng)烈的回聲效果（引致混亂的聲學(xué)）而聞名，我也無(wú)法想象，這部亞當(dāng)斯的作品如果按原定計(jì)劃在戶外演出會(huì)是個(gè)什么樣子。當(dāng)天演出時(shí)，一波又一波的聲浪涌過(guò)來(lái)。按作曲家的原意，首演應(yīng)與主題吻合而在戶外表演，但效果肯定會(huì)被削弱。這一次選擇的室內(nèi)場(chǎng)地雖然回聲過(guò)強(qiáng)，但任何具有更好聲效條件的場(chǎng)所，對(duì)于作品的呈現(xiàn)也不會(huì)起大作用。

現(xiàn)在讓我們來(lái)梳理一下。只用上《我們的死亡》的一小部分時(shí)間，亞當(dāng)斯已帶領(lǐng)他的觀眾度過(guò)了一段令人信服的旅程。相比類似福雷《萬(wàn)物之力》的沉浸式演出（兩部作品的時(shí)長(zhǎng)相差無(wú)幾），同樣應(yīng)對(duì)現(xiàn)代文明與原始環(huán)境相互斗爭(zhēng)的主題，亞當(dāng)斯所傳達(dá)的信息更加有效。

我也必須承認(rèn)，某些功勞得歸于圣約翰大教堂，這個(gè)地標(biāo)為活動(dòng)增添了一點(diǎn)精神上的莊重感（而不特指宗教方面）。從每一個(gè)角度來(lái)看，作品都具有作曲家深藏的、對(duì)自然力量大于人類的認(rèn)同。

儀式和敘事，或者戲劇效果和真實(shí)故事，往往只有一線之隔。但從美學(xué)上來(lái)說(shuō)，審美的結(jié)果或多或少相同。我不知道亞當(dāng)斯會(huì)如何為這部作品歸類——可能是“大規(guī)模的合唱盛典”。如果有一天他決定稱之為“歌劇”，我也不會(huì)有異議。

Grammatically speaking, “opera” is nothing more than the plural of “opus,” the Latin word for “work.”So to be charitable, we can look at Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects as a simple mistake in counting.

On the other hand, since Fure went to Harvard and works with a lot of other smart people, it’s safe to say something else is involved. Her 50-minute piece is lots of things: immersive, sonically rich and sometimes visually stimulating—in part thanks to her equally smart brother, the architect Adam Fure, who designed the piece’s physical environment. It even has a politically correct concept, intending to make us notice the “mounting hum of ecological anxiety around us,”as the composer states in the program notes. But let’s be honest here: it’s not an opera.

Since roughly the day Puccini died it seems we’ve been pondering what constitutes an opera. That’s more than you can say about the literati who invented it in Florence back in the 1500s. They thought they were just recreating Ancient Greek theatre.

These days, though, no one thinks about recreating anything, even—or perhaps especially—when they are.Things always have to be new, even then they aren’t. A half-century ago, when the Beatles “broke new ground”by showing the world how to link songs together thematically, few people mentioned the inconvenient fact that Schubert and Schumann had done the same thing 150 years before. One generation’s song cycle is the next generation’s concept album.

What do you get when a “concept album” has interrelated characters and ends up telling a story?Pete Townshend, the guitarist for The Who who wrote Tommy and Quadrophenia, would call it a“rock opera.” What about those epic American films of the Wild West? Horse operas. What about those silly daytime television dramas, the ones that used to advertise detergent to housewives? Soap operas.

You can see what’s going on here. Even as admirers and practitioners of opera debate what it actually is,plenty of outsiders have co-opted the term merely to inflate the importance of things largely unrelated to the stage tradition.

Now that we’re in the second decade of the 21century, we generally agree that opera need not be sung in “operatic” style (hip-hop and punk rock have been credibly co-opted), need not entirely eschew spoken dialogue, need not be long or even big. Having a story, though, is not negotiable.So I’ll go out on a limb here and say that as long as a work has some kind of dramatic narrative and some kind of musicalized vocalism, you can make a case for it as opera.

The Force of Things, alas, had neither. Oh, there were two vocalists, but they were simply abstract noisemakers treated just as impersonally as the wind players and percussionists involved. Nor were any of these sounds particularly original. The parts of the evening that were audible—many of the sonorities,audiences were told, were too low for humans to hear—owed much to a half century of modernist playing techniques. There’s a certain irony that the work first appeared in 2016 at the Summer Courses at Darmstadt, the site of genuine musical breakthroughs back in the 1950s.

When the piece finally made its way to New York,presented by Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center in Brooklyn, the composer described it as a musical metaphor for the anxieties related to climate change and the slow pace of the natural world. To me, it was moderately interesting series of random sounds that moved from one to the next with little to engage the mind.

左頁(yè)、右：《我們的死亡不會(huì)傷害他人，第一部分》劇照

So calling The Force of Things an opera is rather like comparing a yoga chant to the Ramayana. But then, I think we all agree, a more accurate description like “philosophical sound installation” just wouldn't be as sexy.

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Even with its pompous program notes, The Force of Things wasn't the most pretentious thing I saw over the summer. That would be Our Death Won’t Hurt Anybody – Part 1—a plotless, formless, four-anda-half-hour rumination on Sun Tzu’s Art of War cocommissioned by Barcelona’s GREC Festival and Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District.

Again, think of the irony: it takes less time to read Sun Tzu’s military strategies in their entirety that it did to sit through “Part 1”—which incidentally reminds me of the late Norman Mailer, who once ended a 1300-page novel with the words “to be continued.”Fortunately for readers everywhere, Mailer died before he could contemplate a sequel.

As a collaboration between the Tang Shu-Wing Studio of Hong Kong and Enrique Vargas’s Teatro de los Sentidos of Barcelona, Our Death Won’t Hurt Anybody unfolded in English, Spanish, Catalan and Cantonese—and it seemed like there were snippets of Mandarin and French in there as well. Pretty much everyone in the audience was guaranteed to feel excluded at some point, and the effect will surely be similar—though in different places—when the piece travels to Hong Kong next season.

How much of the original production will remain is more difficult to gauge. Will the actors still initially lead audience members to their seats? Will one of the Chinese actors still stir-fry clams in black-bean sauce on stage and invite the audience to eat? Will audience members still be invited onstage to dance, only to confront a dramatized air raid?

Despite a few effective bits, the evening still had the feel of a workshop, where actors were still getting to know each other. And ultimately, its problem in achieving a climactic sense of devastation was that there was so little momentum to begin with.

Still, the show didn’t have the nerve to call itself an opera.

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Diagnosing why shows fail is so much easier that explaining why they succeed. After Our Death,It’s tempting to say that My Neighbor Sky, a piece inspired by Joan Miró’s sculpture Moon, Sun and One Star, was successful because it was only 50 minutes long, but that would hardly be fair. Nor did it thrive entirely because of dancers Naoyuki Oguri and Andrés Corchero performing the work (to a live soundscape by guitarist Nuno Rubelo) in front of that very sculpture at the Joan Miró Foundation.

Rather, the evening was a success because two artists—one Japanese, one Catalan—shared not only a physical idiom drawing on Japanese butoh and contemporary dance, but also possessed full knowledge of and could respond to each other’s physical strengths, limitations and idiosyncrasies. Still,such artistic intimacy alone hardly guarantees the endeavor’s ultimate success.

The pace of the evening, it must be said, was almost painfully slow. Reimagine Aesop’s “Tortoise and the Hare” as “The Tortoise and the Slug.” As staged by Robert Wilson. And yet, in less than hour,Oguri and Corchero had thoroughly wrung their emotional towels, arriving at a destination palpably transformed without ever signifying that they had ever been on a journey.

Seeing such a strongly expressive narrative exist without benefit of verbal language makes it much harder to endure people who use all the storytelling tools at their disposal and still can’t get it right.Another good example this month was John Luther Adams’s In the Name of the Earth, which also had its world premiere in August at Lincoln Center.

As expansive in personnel as My Neighbor Sky was intimate, In the Name of the Earth featured more than 600 choral singers led by a dozen or so conductors.Originally scheduled to be performed in Central Park,the piece was driven by rain into the shelter of New York’s massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Adams—often called “the other Adams” (and sometimes just “Luther”) to avoid confusion with the composer of Nixon in China and other operas—won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral work Become Ocean, which was characteristically inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. In the Name of the Earth was also aquatically inclined, with choral singers intoning the names of rivers and lakes—as well as mountains and deserts—in a thoroughly inclusive mélange.

Although St. John the Divine is famous for its messy acoustics, I tried without success to imagine Adams’s piece being performed outdoors as originally planned. Waves of sound were the order of the day,and while performing in the great outdoors might send the right signals, the actual sound would be defused beyond recognition. As far as indoor spaces go, any venue with greater sonic precision would’ve been entirely beside the point.

So let’s consider the tally. In only a fraction of the time of Our Death, Adams took his listeners on a far more convincing journey. In as comparably immersive a manner as Fure’s Force of Things (and in nearly the same amount of time), Adams similarly tackled topics of civilization’s struggle with primordial and environmental forces, yet delivered his message with far greater force.

Some of the credit, admittedly, goes to the Cathedral, which did lend the event a certain spiritual—if not particularly religious—gravitas. In literally every direction there was an undeniable depth of intent and an acknowledgement of forces greater than ourselves.

There’s often a fine line between ritual and genuine narrative, or between dramatic effect and an actual story. But aesthetically, the end result is more or less the same. I’m not sure what Adams himself calls the piece—probably a large-scale choral pageant—but if he ever decides to call it an opera, I won’t argue.

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